written extensively on media, law enforcement, and organized crime. The author of Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution; Robert Morris: Financier of the American Revolution; and his new book – Herbert Hoover in the White House: The Ordeal of the Presidency. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Rappleye’s surprising portrait of the Depression-era president, Herbert Hoover, reveals a very different figure than the usual Hoover, engaged and active but loathe to experiment and conscious of his inability to convey hope to the country.

Herbert Clark Hoover was the thirty-first President of the United States He served one term, from 1929 to 1933. Often considered placid, passive, unsympathetic, and even paralyzed by national events, Hoover faced an uphill battle in the face of the Great Depression. Many historians dismiss him as merely ineffective. But in HerbertHooverin the White House, Charles Rappleye draws on rare and intimate sources—memoirs and diaries and thousands of documents kept by members of his cabinet and close advisors—to reveal a very different figure than the one often portrayed. The real Hoover, argues Rappleye, just lacked the tools of leadership.

Herbert Hoover in the White House: The Ordeal of the Presidency by Charles Rappleye.

The Hoover presented in this book comes as a surprise to both his longtime defenders and his many critics. In public Hoover was shy and retiring, but in private he is revealed as a man of passion and sometimes of fury, a man who intrigued against his enemies while fulminating over plots against him. Rappleye describes him as more sophisticated and more active in economic policy than is often acknowledged. We see Hoover watching a sunny (and he thought ignorant) FDR on the horizon. FDR did not “cure” the depression, but he experimented with steps that relieved it. Most importantly he broke the mood of doom almost immediately. The Hoover we see here—bright, well meaning, energetic—lacked the single critical element to succeed as president. He had a first-class mind and a second-class temperament.

HerbertHooverin the White House is an object lesson in the most, perhaps only, talent needed to be a successful president—the temperament of leadership. Rappleye will be speaking at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Museum on May 21, 2016 at 2:00 p.m. For more information: 319-643-5301 or www.hoover.archives.gov